SCHEDULE FOR COMPLETING THE JOURNAL SETS

CONFIRMATION MESSAGES: Within two days after receipt, I'll email you an initial confirmation letting you know that I received your journal set, and a week or so afterwards I'll email you a more formal message with your grade for that set. If you don't receive a timely initial confirmation, it's your responsibility to let me know very soon (not weeks later!) – if I don't confirm receipt, I may well not have received your message and you will need to resend it. Please check your SPAM folder before emailing me about a confirmation.

FORMATTING OF JOURNAL SETS Use a common typeface like Times New Roman, Calibri, etc. and ordinary point size and margin settings. Don't skip several spaces between individual entries, but please include an initial bolded title line for a given author or text so I know what you're writing about. On average, by "a page," one means approximately 500 words. Or as the mafia boss Sam Rothstein says to his hapless chef in Scorsese's film Casino, "From now on, I want you to put an equal amount of blueberries in each muffin. An equal amount of blueberries in each muffin…. I don't care how long it takes. Put an equal amount in each muffin."

JOURNAL SET 1 (Weeks 1-5, DUE BY EMAIL ANY HOUR IN ONE BUNDLED FILE ATTACHMENT ON TUESDAY 02/24): Basho through Goethe. Suggested length of individual entries: 1 page on Basho, ½ page on Saikaku, 1 page total on Enlightenment authors combined, 2 pages on Voltaire, 2 pages on Goethe.

JOURNAL SET 2 (Weeks 6-9, DUE BY EMAIL ANY HOUR IN ONE BUNDLED FILE ATTACHMENT ON TUESDAY 03/24): Romanticism through Chekhov. Suggested length of individual entries: 1 page total on your choice of at least two Romantic poets combined (in other words, ½ page on each of two authors), 1 ½ pages on Dostoyevsky, 1 ½ pages on Tolstoy, 1 page on Chekhov.

ADVICE ON HOW TO DO THE JOURNAL SETS WELL

Start by creating a single file for an entire journal set: then you can add all your entries for the set to it. Don't wait until near the due date for the full journal set to do the entries; instead, write down your reflections as we go through each author's work. That way, you will find the journal sets less burdensome and they will be what they should: a chance to get credit for working out and confronting your own ideas and questions about the texts we will study. Ideally, you should do your individual entries before we discuss the works or portions thereof in class since that would allow you to participate better and get more from class sessions, but doing the entries not long after a class session is certainly acceptable.

What should go into the individual entries that make up a given set? Focus on each text's specific language, themes, and structure to develop your comments, and on substantive questions or observations that arise about the works themselves as you read and reflect. Do NOT bother with the following: detailed biographical material, ideas gleaned from professional online or hard-copy "notes," or vague generalisms about life and literature. As the British romantic poet William Blake once wrote, "to generalize is to be an idiot." (Of course, that's in itself a generalism, but still ….) Your thinking should be your own, not a copy-and-paste job. It would be unfair to suggest that all of the online notes one finds on the Web are inaccurate or inept, but the truth is that they usually say what "everybody knows." Simply retailing what everybody supposedly thinks about a given work won't encourage you to learn anything in the deepest sense (the kind that means something to you personally) from your engagement with literary works. Strike out instead on your own path. The Impressionist critic Walter Pater said that any critic's first task is to register and come to grips with his or her own impressions about the object being experienced. Pater was right: if you can't get clear on your own impressions, on your own questions and observations, you're not likely to say much that interests anybody else. Make that clarity your goal, then, in the journal entries and full sets that you develop.

OPTIONAL QUESTIONS FOR DEVELOPING YOUR JOURNAL ENTRIES

While you will probably want to maintain your journal set by means of free-form entries as noted above, you may find one or more of the following questions useful on occasion as a means of developing your own ideas.

1. For one part of your longer entry on a given author/work, consider a very limited portion of the text -- a stanza or two from a poem, a short passage from a longer prose work, or a small section chosen from within a scene in a play. Analyze it in as much detail as you can: what formal, thematic, or other matters are most important to attend to there, and why?

2. What did you find most difficult to understand (or, alternately, to accept or like) while reading the text/s assigned for this author? What did you do to try to get past the difficulty you describe and understand the work better? Explain with reference to some specific quality that you can tie to a specific part of the text, not with general or dismissive remarks.

3. Offer an assessment of what you consider most worth noting about one text assigned for a specific author: in other words, what do you take away from your experience with the work, what realizations or problems, etc. has it brought into focus for you? Explain with reference to specific qualities or issues -- don't respond with vague praise or unqualified dismissal.

4. Why not generate your own specific, substantive question/s and respond, as if you were writing a thoughtful study question or set of them for a particular author/text?